More Materialist Fantasies, Deflated

Materialist Carl Sagan is credited with the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The dictum is known as the “Sagan Standard,” but it should be known as the “Extraordinary Claims Fallacy,” as explained very well in this article.

Materialists often use the Sagan Standard as a cudgel against theistic claims. For example, as pointed out in the article, they may assert that people do not ordinarily rise from the dead, and therefore the claim that Jesus rose from the dead must be supported by something more than ordinary evidence; it must be supported by some vaguely defined standard of evidence they call “extraordinary evidence.”

My purpose here is not to debunk the Sagan Standard. That has been done many times. See the article linked above and here and here. No, my purpose here is to note the hypocritical double standard in the way materialists employ the Sagan Standard.

Let’s take the example above. People do not ordinarily rise from the dead. True enough, but the claim that nonliving matter spontaneously organized itself into living matter is even more extraordinary. There is no evidence (much less “extraordinary evidence”) to support the claim that it did. As Franklin Harold has admitted, “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”

Yet every materialist believes the claim as a matter of course.

Matter does not ordinarily spontaneously organize itself into a sophisticated self-replicating code, and there is good reason to believe it is impossible to do so.

Yet every materialist believes the claim as a matter of course.

Staggeringly sophisticated systems such as the blood clotting cascade are not ordinarily assembled through the accretion of random errors.

Yet every materialist believes the claim as a matter of course.

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. For the materialist the rule of the day is “extraordinary evidence is required for thee, but not for me.”

The Right Sort of People – backed by academia and the media, as always – are good at this kind of intellectual sleight-of-hand.

It is up to Christians to reveal this sludge pile of deceit for what it is.

Nobody else is going to bother.

Certainly not the Marxist, who (of course) are hard-core materialists and Darwinists.

Sufficiently devout Muslims will merely do the “KILL ALL WHO OPPOSE ISLAM” thing, instead of actually using their brains and logically debunk the lies and foolishness.

It is up to Christians to get the work done: and Christians who only dream of retreat and defeat and hiding in some ghetto somewhere (to escape the need to expand the Kingdom of God, a.k.a. the World of Truth and Justice) will do nothing of the kind.

“Only those willing to obey Jesus Christ’s command to disciple the nations and expand His Kingdom need apply.”

The problem for creationists is that positing an intelligence that is able to create life out of inanimate materials is to claim that life can be created out of non-living materials. The question then becomes, if it’s possible at the hands of a creator then why not through natural causation?

Hmmm. The space station exists. Just why couldn’t it have been built by blind purposeless natural causes? I suppose the analogy is not really fair, because the nano-technology displayed in even the most simple life makes the space station look like a tinker toy.

Materialist beliefs exist to comfort blind men, in the darkness they have willfully chosen for themselves.

In a current thread on SJW invasions in engineering education, in which yet another anti-ID commenter crosses over into troll territory, Charles does a very important worldviews and cultural agendas dissection. One, that is well worth headlining as *food for thought (as opposed to a point by point across-the-board endorsement):

Charles, 51>>The point of the original post was that Engineering was being contaminated with Social Justice Warrior values & viewpoints. As any engineer knows, what makes engineering “Engineering” is the rigorous adherence to physical reality, analysis, and testing to design something that is reliably fit for purpose. As the author’s article at American Conservative elaborates, Prof. Riley’s SJW viewpoint is the antithesis of sound Engineering. kairosfocus summarized this point with his comment that:

“Bridges gotta stand up under load.”

[Troll X’s] snide and dismissive comment that

”How’s that [bridges needing to stand up under load] working out for ID?”

juxtaposed civil engineering with ID, impugning that ID was not Engineering. That is a fallacious comparison on several levels, not least of which is Engineering’s maturity born of hundreds of years of applied science, advancing technology, and development of best practices, contrasted with ID in its relative infancy, as well as engineering being all about “how to design” versus ID which endeavors to reduce to practice the “recognition of design”.

Implicit in [Troll X’s] comment is the presumption that evolution (or materialism or atheism) has a laudable track record over ID similar to engineering. As if to say “evolution” is a successful, testable, reliable theory like “engineering”, whereas ID is an engineering failure.

But evolution has no such track record of theoretical success. Modern evolution doesn’t even have a theory that makes testable predictions, and moreover, all of Darwinian evolution’s predictions (such as transition forms will be found in the geologic record)) have all failed, which I likened to engineering failures in my response to [Troll X]:

john_a_designer then affirms that [Troll X] hadn’t thought through the implications of his atheism, namely that atheism is bankrupt and contributes nothing intellectually, summed up as

“Haven’t we been told that atheism is “just disbelief”?”

Indeed.

At which point, I elaborated that while atheists claim they “just disbelieve”, atheists are not content with just disbelieving. That in fact, atheists fear and worry they are wrong as evidenced by the effort they put out to convince “believers” that there is no evidence for their belief in God or Jesus Christ.

When someone “just disbelieves” there is little or no concern attached to the disbelief. I gave the example of disbelieving in a flat earth. When someone argues the earth is flat, the atheist might criticize that belief and show a space station picture of our spherical green, blue and white “marble”, but they don’t define themselves by their disbelief – they don’t call themselves “aflatearthers”, they don’t write volumes on the philosophy of aflatearthism, they don’t dedicate websites to flatearth skepticism, they don’t spend countless man-years holding flatearthers up to ridicule. No. They shrug, and move on.

As wrong headed as flatearthers are, why don’t disbelievers define themselves as “aflatearthers” and lobby for flatearth beliefs to be eliminated from society? Because they don’t care, because they have a confidence born of evidence and experience that the earth is round, and flatearth arguments just don’t matter.

But atheists define themselves as A-Theists – against, without, absent, sans, theism. They invariably in social or political gatherings are self-compelled to declare, to signal, their atheistic world view and how it is self-evident to be intellectually superior over Christians in specific and over religionists in general (cowards that they are, they rarely take specific exception with Muslims or Islam). And atheists write volumes about their self-labeled viewpoint, they fill libraries, they write textbooks, they lobby legislatures, they put signs on buses, all to advance their self-defined atheistic world view. They are very concerned and discontent about their disbelief.

Why?

Because they are intellectually threatened. Because “The Enlightenment” and atheism’s ascendancy is over. Back in the day, when we didn’t know about the Big Bang, when we didn’t know how the universe was fine-tuned for our life, when we didn’t know how exquisitely mechanized are cellular functions, when we didn’t know that DNA and RNA were actually huge complex information programs densely encoded in precisely folded chemical molecules that have no natural tendency to otherwise so organize themselves (let alone replicate and error correct), and then there is the little matter of human consciousness. Back then being an atheist was easy, almost automatic. It was easy to say “random chance did it” – but that was an ignorant and arrogant presumption.

Today, the materialist, the atheist, has no answer for any of that. They have a multitude of speculations, yes, but no engineering-like understanding or scientific theories that make testable predictions. Evolutionary “theory” in all its claims (setting aside its failures) has nothing like our level of understanding of relativity, quantum mechanics, chemistry, or information theory. In fact the scientists who are expert in those subjects [—> will often] acknowledge that “chance” could not have begun our fine-tuned universe or life.

The modern atheist is forced into special pleading for a multi-verse, that free-will is imaginary and then piggyback on Christian morality as they have no basis in their own materialism to justify good or evil other than personal preference in any particular situation. About all of which, they could be complacent if it weren’t for Christian theists.

While the atheist has no defense against the failure of science to prove a multiverse or that life arose from inert chemicals, the Christian has an affirmative argument for what the atheist can’t prove. The Bible records that God made the Heavens and Earth, ex nihilo (the Big Bang), created life with consciousness and morality, and gave us free will to love and obey God, or not. Only the Christian is so audacious as to confront atheism directly.

Hence the atheist or materialist drive to remove Christian prayer from schools, thought from universities, and gatherings from public places. And the atheist was not content to merely suppress Christian viewpoints, but now seeks to impose atheist behavior on Christians; Christians must bake cakes for homosexual weddings, Christian chaplains must teach Islam, Christian schools must hire atheists and allow them to teach “diversity”. What the atheist can not achieve by intellectual persuasion, they seek to impose by legislation and force of confiscation and imprisonment.

All the foregoing while atheists cloak themselves in a false morality that they hijacked from aspects of Christianity. Atheists talk of being opposed to murder, except when Muslims murder homosexuals and then it’s abject silence. Atheists talk of being for equal rights for women, except unborn women or Muslim women. Atheists talk of doing good for mankind, but atheists don’t start hospitals, didn’t start universities (like Harvard or Princeton), and you don’t see atheists organizing charities or feeding the homeless. [–> NB: There are exceptions to this, we don’t have to endorse every claim to think something is worth headlining.]

The atheist argues that religious views have no justification in society’s laws, yet declaring bankruptcy has its roots in Judeo “jubilee” forgiveness of debt and servitude, marriage is a Judeo Christian sacrament, and the legal prohibitions on murder, theft, and lying all are millennia’s old Judeo-Christian teachings.

To Christian arguments against the atheist, the atheist in variably responds with a) “science will some day prove _____” and b) “there is no evidence for God (and the Bible doesn’t count as evidence)”

The problem for the atheist is that a) science is further away than ever of proving “chance” underlay the big bang and our information-based life. In fact, information may also underlie the laws of physics and the hence the fine-tuned universe in which we live, and b) there is evidence for the existence of God, some of it logical, philosophical arguments, some of it forensic proofs.

And now we come to the atheists’ discomfort with their own disbelief. So, not only is materialistic evolution a theoretical failure and scientific near impossibility, the atheist has no alternative proven scientific explanation for what the Bible plainly declares were creative acts of God. The atheist is forced to borrow and impose biblical concepts just to maintain a civil society (while banning Christian beliefs the atheist dislikes). Lastly the atheist is further confronted with evidence for God’s existence and that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior. That forensic evidence is fulfilled biblical prophecy in which God supernaturally declares to Daniel several hundred years in advance that the Messiah would appear, and forensic evidence further shows that prophecy to have been fulfilled by Jesus Christ.>>

The Master Class is going down!

Their sterile and bankrupt secualristic cultures are headed for the dustbin of history: they may be be utterly forgotten… but I think that, instead, their will be held up for laughter by the living cultures of the future.

As I would put it:

Exactly what they think would happen, after they endorsed widespread abortion? After they decided to back sexual sterility and delusional fantasies? When they decided to do their level best to kill the future before it peeks his head out of the womb? When they chose financial lunacy instead of paying off their debts, cutting back on the Saviour State, and get some saving for the future done?

Their cultures will vanish off the face of the earth, and the men who lead them are headed for a very surprising discovery, five minutes after they have died.

As the more thoughtful believers realize:

Evil cultures cannot be cast into hell, as they have no souls: all they can do is die. But evil men face a greater punishment than a merely physical death…

Why go down with the damned men, and their damned societies?

Better to repent of your sins, stand with Christ, and inherit the future!